Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist and comparative literature scholar, who writes on contemporary political subjectivation, sexuality, gender, psychoanalysis and aesthetics in modernist, anti/post/decolonial and contemporary forms with reference to the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the USA. She is the author of On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant (University of California Press, 2010), which investigates a foundational fantasy of modernity: speaking in one’s own voice.  Working between Arabic, English, and French, Al-Kassim has published in many journals and essay collections. Her work on Indigenous poetry, water and endangered ecologies in Mahmoud Darwish, Lee Maracle and Rita Wong appears in Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai (WLU Press 2023); she presented this work in October at the Dar al-Kalima University Conference, “Land, People and Culture” in Bethlehem, Palestine. For a decade a professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine, Al-Kassim now teaches at UBC. Al-Kassim has been a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, a Senior Seminar Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, and a Sawyer Seminar, Residency Fellow at the University of California, Humanities Research Institute. Recipient of a 2019 SSHRC grant for the 2020 conference Critical Nationalisms, Counterpublics, Al-Kassim’s work today centres paradoxes of exposure in the political and aesthetic practices of those who inherit resistance and protest as inescapable realities.

Emad Armoush is a Syrian/Canadian multi-instrumentalist musician and singer, active in the Arabic, flamenco, world and creative improv music scene of Vancouver since 2000. Inspired to bring his roots from Arabic traditions into his current musical life and influences, and awarded grants from the BC and Canada Arts Councils, Emad released his debut album in 2021 with the members of his group Rayhan, some of Canada’s finest creative musicians. In November of 2023, he released his sophomore album of 5 duos highlighting original compositions. Motivated, he is now busy composing and arranging new music for the second album with his group Rayhan. Emad has performed in many music festivals across Canada and Europe in a multitude of collaborations.